We Know the Devil

Clever videogame. I liked the dude named Venus who didn't really like being a dude Edit: This is a really special game. It's honest and naked and it lays its characters bare and it'll break your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ heart. These kids have been taught that they're broken people and that to acknowledge the hidden truths in their hearts is sinful and it makes me want to cry, the guilt and shame that bleeds through their most genuine moments of passion and joy is soul rending. God in We Know the Devil is rhetoric, he's homogeneity and he's gospel and he's a scarecrow for social deviance. He boxes people up and makes them build walls around the parts of themselves which they're supposed to hate. The fiery passion alight inside each of the scouts will ravage god and his world if it can be allowed to escape but it burns too bright to be extinguished, so it has to be tempered and demonized. To see Venus, Jupiter and Neptune defy their programming and allow themselves to burn so bright they blot out the darkness killing them makes my heart soar, this game is sad and tragic but it's also beautiful and poetic and magical. It will make you feel everything and it will make you feel nothing and it will hurt you and heal you and break you and put you back together again. Venus is still my favourite character. Her written story is wonderful but the conclusion it reaches diverges from how I had personally received and connected with her. To me Venus exhibited an unrest with the gender binary, she experiences discomfort with the social rituals and proclivities of guys and in an effort to escape that assimilates into a group of girls, but despite being more comfortable around them at a surface level she still grapples with inversions of those same social rituals hidden under artifice, rituals she fails to imitate. Trying to match the expectations and responsibilities of gender is an exhausting and pointless exercise; gender is too small for everything that Venus is. This is certainly not an objective analysis of the text - it's intuitions and projections which I overlaid onto Venus because I saw a great deal of myself in her. But my personal interpretation of Venus is largely why the game stuck with me as much as it did and I would be remiss to not mention it. Please play this game. I hope it will do for you what it did for me. There are a couple of typos. Like three I think.

A short, but worthwhile visual novel. Sure, it is a bit clunky with certain mechanics, but considering you don't need to spend hours and hours to go through all the content, I don't think it's enough for me to care. The story it tells is impactful, even if you don't necessarily relate to any of the girls (although me having knowledge of the game prior to actually playing it might have made less of an impact on me... but that is really just a me thing, if you do not know anything about the game, go play it by yourself, you won't regret it!!) It is always important to remember that no matter what, you deserve to openly be yourself and you are never a burden for doing so. The soundtrack is absolutely wonderful too, it matches the atmosphere of the game really nicely, and [spoiler]Incense (Smoke & Honey), the track that plays when one of the girls finally lets the devil in, is probably the one that had the most impact on me.[/spoiler] I would recommand purchasing the game while on sale, but the default price doesn't feel too expensive to me (and honestly, having the game usually costs $6.66 is pretty funny i think)

Game that definitley hit hard for me, themes that are very close to home. Absolutely worth playing through all the endings and seeing all the different ways the dynamics can play out, the imagery and symbolism and themes have left me with a lot to think about. It's short, but powerful. And it's length is a benefit, keeping it approachable, especially on the replays! It does everything it needs to, though the little bonus after getting all the endings is a treat too~